Child's kick vs Incantation of Lightning

[Ouroboros]

Not that this isn't a funny debate, because it is, but I think this just nailed it all.

@Fishy

We can talk edge cases forever. We have to remember the rules are a numerical abstraction of the world and wont work for everything. The SG needs to apply a degree of logic for edge cases.

@RafaelB

Given my new understanding of callen's point, I can't really disagree with it, RAW. But it creates the weird case of a person, badly wounded, having more chance of surviving the next strike by dropping to the ground and staying still. This isn't a feature, it's a bug.

If it is not that weird: callen don't fall into weirdness because what he argues is that given that you couldn't defend worse than an non-responding target, then when the numbers says so you defend as a non-responding target: just a practical example of what @Fishy wrote: do your job as SG and put common sense where rules get you far away from logical results.

Now someone may claim "but what if you actually defend yourself worse than someone just lying on the ground?" Ok, sure, let's say someone might be quite wounded and, I don't know, trying to actively stop a battle axe with his bare neck. Then apply these penalties if you feel they fit. I'd just wavehand an instant kill, anyway.

[RafaelB (Rafael Bessoni)]

@Ouroboros

what he argues is that given that you couldn't defend worse than an non-responding target

No. This has been my understanding for most of the discussion, and this is wrong.

He argues that the person can simply choose to take the blow, being effectively helpless for that strike, and that this (not dodging, not fighting back) being a "non-action", no penalty is applied. Furthermore, since you are helpless, a flat -10 replaces the defense total.

EDIT for completeness:
Callen argument isn't one of analogy or of SG call based on common sense.

It's plain application of RAW.

A RAW that I, personally, happen to dislike.

[Tellus]

@RafaelB

Not quite.

Not in name (as mentioned), but in effect? Oh yes.

Think of someone shooting an arrow against a defenseless target (but not at point blank range). There is no guarantee that the shooter will K.O. the target, but it surely is easier to hit, and the -10 for defenseless account for that.

I must admit, I was thinking of melee combat when I wrote that statement.
Shooting an arrow at a target not trying to defend is mostly like shooting at a static target - you know, those round pieces of painted paper. You're not guaranteed to hit, but the contest in (usually) about who scores the better hit, not who hits.

Someone closer, using a sword, but having to defend against another opponent(s) also won't have the time for a sure-kill strike.

Not how I indicated a (semi-) skilled combatant above?
For a static target, striking a blow that will take your victim out of combat is depressingly easy. And that's what you are if you're not defending.

Again, -10 for defenseless target, but no guarantee of deadly strike on a weak spot.

almost, yes. I might go for a rule of "roll a dice, don't botch*, but a mere -10 is silly.

If you can take aim and be sure to cut of the head, shoot in the eye, slice the throat, etc, then there isn't really any chance of (a human) target surviving. But this isn't combat anymore, it doesn't make sense to use combat mechanics to solve this.

... and that's essentially the situation when the target isn't defending ...

[Ouroboros]

@RafaelB

@Ouroboros

what he argues is that given that you couldn't defend worse than an non-responding target

No. This has been my understanding for most of the discussion, and this is wrong.

If you say so, go for it!

I'd stick with my idea. Which is that exceeding 3 seconds of table time for an scenario like that is bad time management.

[Tellus]

@RafaelB

@Ouroboros

what he argues is that given that you couldn't defend worse than an non-responding target

In combat, non-responding means dead.

No. This has been my understanding for most of the discussion, and this is wrong.

He argues that the person can simply choose to take the blow, being effectively helpless for that strike, and that this (not dodging, not fighting back) being a "non-action", no penalty is applied. Furthermore, since you are helpless, a flat -10 replaces the defense total.

And then you're still doing something. You're still trying to accept the blow on armor or at least trying not directly to your most vulnerable parts. Which is still a form of defense.

Callen argument isn't one of analogy or of SG call based on common sense.

It's plain application of RAW.

A RAW that I, personally, happen to dislike.

Agreed. It is misinformed. Which is what I'm trying to explain.

[RafaelB (Rafael Bessoni)]

@Tellus

And then you're still doing something.

When you are standing still, doing nothing, are you doing something? What if you literally drop to the ground, close your eyes and just wait?

I think your point is valid, and TBH I would at minimum require a character willing to take a blow to make a personality roll (modified by brave, coward or similar).

But I also happen to think that penalties should apply even for non-actions (for reasons that I have already stated, and a few more that I haven't but shouldn't be relevant), so I won't enter this discussion as I don't think I can contribute to it.

[callen]

@Tellus

In combat, non-responding means dead.

But not in the real world, so why here? There are plenty of people who have been shot who didn't know they were being shot at and who have survived. But your odds of survival are usually much better if you can go for cover or similarly dodge, and thus the -10.

@Tellus

And then you're still doing something. You're still trying to accept the blow on armor or at least trying not directly to your most vulnerable parts. Which is still a form of defense.

Why? Have you ever watched a real arrow fired at real plate armor. You could just sit there praying and be unlikely to get wounded. Meanwhile, yes, I've just stood there and taken a punch without trying to adjust where it lands. It's not fun, but you can do it. So why is such not possible when it is in the real world?

@RafaelB

But I also happen to think that penalties should apply even for non-actions (for reasons that I have already stated

You didn't reply for clarity about the falling person, probably lost in the pile of posts. I noted for David above that the rules (without applying Wound Penalty to non-Combat Soak Total) already do make it more likely you will take falling damage if you're wounded if you can react to it. But if you're tied up and dropped on your head, I'm not sure why a broken leg would matter for the head injury.

Meanwhile, did you look at the ice-water examples I cited, which the one case where we have extremely good data?

[RafaelB (Rafael Bessoni)]

@callen

@Tellus

In combat, non-responding means dead.

But not in the real world, so why here? There are plenty of people who have been shot who didn't know they were being shot at and who have survived. But your odds of survival are usually much better if you can go for cover or similarly dodge, and thus the -10.

Agreed with this. But to keep barking on the same tree, fewer people who had already been shot 3 times survive the 4th shot (being previously wounded increases chance of death, even if you are defenseless).

@callen

You didn't reply for clarity about the falling person, probably lost in the pile of posts. (...) But if you're tied up and dropped on your head, I'm not sure why a broken leg would matter for the head injury.

You are talking of a specific case (person being dropped on their head). I'm talking generically. I don't think the case changes if both the thrown people are conscious, or if they are both unconscious, unless we start to nitpick about where is the damage, or how are they falling.

But for a more constrained example: a conscious person, pushed from 2nd floor (perfectly survivable height) is more likely to get an injury when landing if she is already injured to begin with.

@callen

Meanwhile, did you look at the ice-water examples I cited, which the one case where we have extremely good data?

Yes, it's good data. But how often should you roll for damage in this case? For example, falling damage has provisions to increase or reduce the damage according to the hardness of the surface you will hit.

I could argue that while this isn't stated in the rules, for icy water you should only roll for damage after 1 minute, instead of every round. This is a case to change/increment the rules for heat and corrosion, not to prevent damage penalties of being applied.

And of course, some abstraction might be needed. Ice water isn't going to make half a dozen cuts any worse (I think, I'm not a doctor), but you still have more chance of going into shock and dying from the accrued damage, since you were already hurt.

[callen]

@RafaelB

I don't think the case changes if both the thrown people are conscious, or if they are both unconscious, unless we start to nitpick about where is the damage, or how are they falling.

But for a more constrained example: a conscious person, pushed from 2nd floor (perfectly survivable height) is more likely to get an injury when landing if she is already injured to begin with.

It changes dramatically for consciousness, actually. There are lots of ways to cushion landings from moderate heights, but these require action. So we're looking at penalties to actions rather that to Soak. So the problem here isn't that there should be penalties to Soak. It's that all the falling rules make it all-or-nothing: you can act to avoid falls, but the rules don't handle anything about acting while falling.

@RafaelB

Yes, it's good data. But how often should you roll for damage in this case?...
I could argue that while this isn't stated in the rules, for icy water you should only roll for damage after 1 minute, instead of every round.

Damage is rolled 1/round, explicitly:

The damage is inflicted once every six seconds (once per combat round)

And this gives fairly realistic results if you do not apply Wound Penalty.

[The_Fixer]

@ErikT

You mean Enduring Constitution?
I don't see any need to change it.

Yes, that one.

A minor virtue to ignore 1 point of wound was OK with the old system, where your penalties were capped. It still works quite well for fatigue, IMO.

I've never taken it, but I've seen players being dismayed by its efficiency regarding wounds, so I wondered if this was a common issue.

[RafaelB (Rafael Bessoni)]

@callen

There are lots of ways to cushion landings from moderate heights, but these require action. So we're looking at penalties to actions rather that to Soak. So the problem here isn't that there should be penalties to Soak.

Still doesn't change the point that someone already injured is more likely to become further injured, which is the point I am making. This is true both for the conscious and for the unconscious.

I think it would make sense to further penalize someone unconscious in falling damage, maybe applying another -10, to mirror helpless combatants, or giving a bonus to conscious targets, idk. The details of this are a different discussion, however.

@callen

@RafaelB

Yes, it's good data. But how often should you roll for damage in this case?...

I could argue that while this isn't stated in the rules, for icy water you should only roll for damage after 1 minute, instead of every round.

Damage is rolled 1/round, explicitly:

The damage is inflicted once every six seconds (once per combat round)

I was unclear.
I'm talking about no explicit statement to modify the frequency of the rolls based on the situation. The rules account for increased damage based on the exposure to the damage source, but there is no provision for reducing the frequency of the rolls (I'm not actually saying that there should be. I'm mentioning that there isn't, but that it could be reasonable in a few cases).

Also, a minor nitpick: the current system may give realistic results for immersion of not-wounded people in ice water. I don't think there is available data for how fast someone wounded goes into shock vs. someone unhurt.

[loke]

@RafaelB

Agreed with this. But to keep barking on the same tree, fewer people who had already been shot 3 times survive the 4th shot (being previously wounded increases chance of death, even if you are defenseless).

That is also the case here. You have to roll recovery rolls for each wound, so the more wounds you have, the more likely you are to botch some recovery roll.

I agree that it the probability of succumbing to the wounds within 24h of the battle may be too low in ArM, and particularly for astronomically accumulated penalties, but that is a matter much larger than the question at hand.

[RafaelB (Rafael Bessoni)]

Once more I might have been unclear.

You have A and B, twins, blindfolded and tied to chairs. A is severely wounded (you tortured him for information) but alive. B is fine.

C, and ally of A and B, is running in your direction. You want to kill them, but you don't have time to carefully aim (if you do that you will be pretty much defenseless against C, which you would rather avoid). So you shot each one once and flee. Who is more likely to die from these parting shots, A or B?

This is the case I'm arguing about. I say A is more likely to die. Some would argue that both have the same chance, because neither can dodge. Some say yet that there is the same chance because you are giving both A and B a shot to the head since they are helpless, to which I disagree since you can't take your time to aim (in this case, you wanting to flee from C prevents you from taking your time). The same general case applies independently of the weapon, even melee. If you can't aim, you swing/stab and hope you did a good job in killing.

If they both survive the parting shots, then yes, A is much more likely to die instead of recovering, and this is already accounted for by him having multiple wounds and any of them possibly causing death.

[callen]

I think it's pretty unclear. One guy has a body part about to fall off and that part gets hit: no big deal. The other guy is gets the same part hit and you have an injury. One guy has a body part about to fall off and a weak hit in the right spot fully severs it. The other guy is gets the same part hit and you have an injury. They both get shot through the eye and into the brain: they're probably equally dead. You can make a lot of cases go either way or tie.

What I think is stupid is that the guy who has taken 30 cuts (just enough to warrant -1) to his arms and legs nearly automatically dies when you pierce his ear for a new earring or cut his skin (e.g. scalpel) to start putting him back together.

I also think it's stupid that we can now do an instant kill on a 4000 ton dragon by kicking it in the tail after people have done 100 cuts that would each give a -1 Wound to a knight.

[loke]

@RafaelB

Who is more likely to die from these parting shots, A or B?

Exactly. They are equally likely to die from that parting shot, but A is a lot more likely to die from accumulated wounds. They are equally likely to take an incapacitating wound from the last bullet, but A may already be incapacitated by accumulated penalties.

Yes, I am also not convinced that the handling of accumulated wounds is optimally realistic in ArM, but a change is likely to create as many problems as it fixes.

In this particular instance, I am not going to read LoM, so I will not know about the passive -10 defence. Thus I would just make a fiat judgement and move on. I am also quite likely to round off -20 penalties to dead, for no better reason than narrative flow.

[silveroak]

There has a been a lot going on here, but essentially, any cap on damage will make some characters/opponents effectively unkillable. The higher the cap the fewer characters this will apply to, and at some point there is some value in asking whether they shouldn't be effectively unkillable or if they were not close enough already to not worry about it (if they need a -100 defense penalty for you to hurt them then you didn't exactly have a huge chance to begin with) that being said the core mechanic of combat in ars magica is the idea of wearing an opponent down and the building penalties. To me any cap on penalties is a betrayal if that core mechanism. As I mentioned before under realism, someone who is unconscious and beaten is more vulnerable than someone who is merely unconscious.

[RafaelB (Rafael Bessoni)]

@callen

You can make a lot of cases go either way or tie.

Yes, and that is why we use dice. If you roll a 1 and a 9, you narrate the strike luckily hitting the head. If you roll poorly, it just grazed the target. If you rolled poorly and still managed to kill due to wound penalties, the hit makes a previous wound worse, causing severe bleeding. Etc, etc. The dice account for the inumerous possible cases.

@callen

I also think it's stupid that we can now do an instant kill on a 4000 ton dragon by kicking it in the tail after people have done 100 cuts that would each give a -1 Wound to a knight.

Of course it's stupid when you say it like that.

For starters, we have been discussing a high quantity of wounds to expound on the topic, but the amount that would arise organically would be lower. Take Stellatus. If someone starts by being barely able to wound him (causing 1 point of damage after subtracting soak), you will see on average 13 light wounds, 4 medium wounds and 3 heavy wounds, give or take, for a total wound penalty of 40 to his defense total (leaving him at -22, not much more than a -10 cap). The next strike is likely to be incapacitating or deadly.

But let's assume that after 100 castings of The Wound that Weeps (PeAn version), Stellatus has 100 light wounds. You are defining a hit to the tail with the description "you kick the dragon in the tail, he gets what should be no more than a light wound and dies". But what would actually happen is:

The guard captain strikes against Stellatus. Severely weakened by the blood loss (the DT is going to be at -82), the dragon is unable to protect the weak spot under his chin, and the sword trespasses the dragon's throath.

OR

The hunter's arrow finds one of the cuts and travels directly to the innards of the beast, striking his heart. Stellatus falls to the ground.

OR

Kiddus, the kid, kicks the dragon but botches his attack, hitting the tail. Still, the kick manages to widen one of the cuts (the attack advantage is 82, -20 soak there is still 62 damage left). His nervous system already saturated due to the wounds, the resulting jolt of pain ravages Stellatus spine as if it were a lightning bolt, and his vision blackens due to the pain.

Of course, being the SG, you could just say that a kick to the tail wouldn't be able to kill a dragon, no matter how badly wounded he is.

---

Anyway, I've already made my case, repeatedly. I will refrain from arguing any further.

[ezzelino]

I think that capping the Defense Total at -10 probably makes sense for "normal humans". Any single whiplash, tossed stone, child's kick etc. should have a fairly low chance of being a coup the grace that kills outright, no matter how wounded a character is, unless the attacker is very strong or very very skilled. Slitting a defenseless person's throat with an appropriate tool is a different story, but really needs no mechanics, as Fishy pointed out. That said, not capping the Defense Total does not lead to terribly unrealistic situations anyways.

Problems start to come out with characters of very high Soak, and/or very large Size. With a Defense cap, really high-Soak opponents are almost invulnerable to "normal" attacks. That's ok I think - it's the reason why you look for the proverbial chink in the armour (or Achilles' heel), or you wrestle the opponent to the ground and bury him alive, or whatever.

What I find displeasing are the effects on very large creatures without truly impregnable Soaks. These, you can easily wound lightly, over and over and over. After a while, they are paralyzed by lesser wounds - they have such huge penalties to all actions that they can't do anything that's not automatic. But the Defense Total cap means you still can't Incapacitate (or kill) them in any reasonable span of time, and they can just get away or use those powers that have no minimum success threshold. I call this the Lame Leviathan issue.

I'd note the difference with callen's example: a Size +14 dragon is the size of a warship - sure, it will take you a long time to disable it with an axe. Well, with a Size +14 dragon, it will take you relatively little time to take it down to -50 to all actions, but much much longer to Incapacitate it. I do not think the two types of disabling should be so uncoupled.

The problem is that the latter type of adversary (big but not nearly invulnerable) is a favourite of many SGs. The huge dragon. The towering giant. The many-tentacled kraken. They are just so impressive! And the SG will adjust their soak so that they can be barely wounded by the PCs, trusting their huge size to make the fight last long. And long it will last, with most of it spent by the PCs and the SG trying to see who's the first to roll three 1s in a row!

If you do remove the Defense Cap, the last problem largely disappears ... for "defendable" attacks. But "undefendable" attacks, like a Pilum of Fire or an Incantation of Lightning, still suffer from it. For some reason, that's even worse -- I really hate having the huge dragon unable to do anything after taking six dozen Incantations of Lightning, the Lightning-happy Flambeau symmetrically unable to get the beast to croak, and then a waif comes along and offs the wyrm with a clumsy kick. If there's one situation that I really want the rules to avoid is this one, which I call the Wyrmkiller Waif issue.

Balancing it all is not easy ... I guess my favourite would be:
Wound penalties should make every character progressively more susceptible, without limit, to incapacitation and death (thus avoiding Lame Leviathans) - but more crucially, this should either hold true for both a "defendable" attack (an axe blow) and an "undefendable" one (an Incantation of Lightning), or for neither (avoiding Wyrmkiller Waifs).

[Tugdual]

First, real world.
How often do people die on a hit vs 2-15 minutes later when the blood loss catches up with them? When does the pain from wounds makes you unable to continue?
Following on that, immediate Recovery roll during a long fight (or whatever conditions) could kill by shock. This would remove any absurdities from the 1000 paper cut Energizer bunny.

Second, the -10 Defense Total.
I would change that to -10 - Soak as the limit. By ignoring Soak on your "best hit possible", you insure serious damage from spells. If you don't want easy spells, require Target:Part to aim at the weaknesses revealed.

Third, make the ReCo guidelines progressive, level 10 only suppress -5 penalty and you need level 15 for -10 penalty.

I believe a few tweaks can reduce the absurdities to a reasonable level.

[loke]

@Tugdual

I believe a few tweaks can reduce the absurdities to a reasonable level.

Absolutely. Most if not all of these tweaks are best handled ad hoc and not systematically, though. We are talking mainly about edge cases and edge cases are different. Your target: part proposal for instance, is already warranted, but is only useful if the monster has been designed with vulnerabilities to such part attacks. This is critical, for instance, for the Hydra in The Tempest (sorry 2ed), but each creature needs its own fiat rules.

And yes, target: part is a good idea. Allowing untargeted spells to benefit from weaknesses that can be targeted does not make sense once the distinction between untargeted and targeted spells has been made. I do not like the idea of one spell to slay them all. That the hoplite needs more than one tool for the job is just a good thing.

I do find it odd that there is no roll is required to avoid succumbing to accumulated wounds, but I think a Sta or Personality Trait roll makes more sense than an immediate recovery roll, and a personality trait roll is already warranted I think, subject to narrative judgement. A recovery roll makes a lot of sense once the character drops and has the chance to relax. Dying from accumulated wounds is not instant, and sometimes takes a fairly long time.